How things are created, mainly dealing with the process and means of creation
Economic collapse means you can build a lot for your buck amongst the rubble, especially if you’re an artist in Detroit.
But its particular brand of civic and economic decay has also drawn something unexpected: a small but well-publicized movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something out of the rubble.
TED, Banksy and Make Magazine are some of the big names, and the mayor has hired a special position to help coordinate art events.
In publishing her latest book, Jillian Tamaki says this about the importance of play to the creative spirit:
But I do sincerely believe that without personal work and comics, I might go nuts. For the most part, there is little Sense of Play in commercial illustration (there are a few glorious exceptions to this rule). And the Sense of Play is really what nourishes creativity and, ultimately, good work (paid or otherwise). Sometimes, I think, it’s actually more important than rigorous practice.
I have a day job that pays the bills, but my creative projects save my soul.
At concerts, the pop of a camera flash is constant. You see it on TV at the Super Bowl or some other event. At a Robbie Williams concert, for a Nikon ad, he called upon the crowd to raise their cameras and take a picture. The result:
James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
Understanding that, there are several other tenets:
Zen koans aside, it’s interesting to distinguish that from a finite standpoint, resources are scarce and must be consumed, but with an endless, infinite perspective, resources are plentiful and can be created. Carse discusses resource issues briefly, however, he mainly applies logic to his thesis to different areas of life–learning (training vs. education), sex (body vs. spirit), family (choosing vs. having), stories (plot vs. themes).
Finite and Infinite Games is a good book for anyone looking for perspective, but it’s not an easy read in the sense that it’s tediously and brutally logical. Perhaps that’s what’s needed to fully explain infinite concepts in a finite span of pages.
After a project, it’s a good thing to capture your thoughts on how you did. This includes everything from the initial idea, the the steps you took to get everything together and complete it, for better or worse. Craig Mod did a writeup about the whole process of creating Art Space Tokyo using Kickstarter as a means to raise funds for his project.
Kickstarter.com is a fund raising website. You create an account, describe your project and set a money goal to be obtained within a specific time period. Anyone in the world with an Amazon account can pledge money to help fund your project. Pledges are tiered, with each tier offering different incentives. If your project doesn’t reach your pre-set (unchangeable) monetary goal in the (unchangeable) time limit, nobody pays. If you reach your goal before the time limit, you continue to raise money until the time limit is up. This system has several interesting implications.
Backers simply can’t lose — if you can’t complete the project, they don’t pay. And if you can, they get both their tier award and the satisfaction of knowing they were instrumental in seeing your project through to completion.
I really wish I had heard about this as money was being raised. The book looks amazing.
The Awl deconstructs Inception as a movie about making movies, or the act of creation.
Like 8½, Inception is a movie about making movies; it’s not that the whole movie “is a dream,” though, but rather that the whole movie is an allegory of creation.
Upon second viewing, the metaphor for creation makes sense across the entire 2.5 hours–seeking a muse, finding inspiration beyond that muse and persevering to bring your vision to reality.